It Could Happen Here Weekly 246

**Robert Evans** (0:03)
Hey, everybody.

**Robert Evans** (0:04)
Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

**Carlos** (0:29)
Hello, dear listener. You're listening to It Could Happen Here. My name is Carlos. I'm a journalist from Puerto Rico.
I'm here with James.

**James** (0:37)
Hey, how are you doing?

**Carlos** (0:39)
Hi. Nice to have you on for this, James. Yeah. Let me ask, have you heard about a little thing called imperialism?

**James** (0:47)
I have. During my education in the United Kingdom, it was an issue that they raised once or twice.

**Carlos** (0:55)
You would say you're quite knowledgeable about imperialism then?

**James** (0:59)
Sure. I think I have a little grasp of it, both from learning about it and teaching about it. There's a whole lot of imperialism. I don't think I've covered all of it, so I'm excited to learn about some extra parts of it.

**Carlos** (1:12)
Same, same. Actually, I would say so I'm from Puerto Rico, and as a subject of American imperialism, I'm very happy to share this episode today, which is a history of American overseas expansion, focused particularly on its colonies. There are several American colonies. Puerto Rico is the most populous one and the most known, but there are several others.
So I want to start this episode by laying out some definitions and frameworks in case people aren't familiar with them.
When people think of the United States, they typically only think about the contiguous United States, also known as the Lower 48 This is how most people imagine the US today, and maybe they include Alaska and Hawaii. This is what historian Benedict Anderson calls the Logo Map in his seminal book Imagined Communities. Essentially, the way that it works is that if every country had merch then this is the logo that would be on it. This is literal in some cases. For example, I saw a lot of America 250 shirts that only had the map with the Lower 48 on it.
The Logo Map, whether people mean it or not, is often a political statement. Whatever people imagine the Logo Map to be is what they consider the dominion of their government. For example, if you see an IDF or Russian soldier with a patch that includes Gaza and the West Bank in Israel or Ukraine as part of Russia, then you very likely know that person's thoughts on the territorial borders of their respective countries. However, what is included in the Logo Map is often just as important as what isn't included. In the case of the United States, which has continuously lied to itself about being an empire, the lower 48 Logo Map hides the country's former territories, Alaska and Hawaii if they're not included, its current territories like Puerto Rico and Guam, as well as a smattering of military bases that it owns across the world. This omission in its self-conception is an act of American exceptionalism giving visual credence to the fact that the country is one homogeneous polity, not a settler, a colonial state, or a global superpower with overseas possessions that it continues to colonize to this day.

**James** (3:34)
Yeah. I think the America 250 with the lower 48 on it, it's a really fascinating image.
There is no historical argument. The countries on that map were not the United States 250 years ago, the places on that map.

**Carlos** (3:49)
Absolutely.

**James** (3:50)
When people think in their mind of their imagined community that is America, that is what they think of. Even though I think very few of the T-shirt wearers with the 250 map would be like, yes, Hawaii and Alaska are colonies, and we should let them be, let alone discussing Puerto Rico, Guam, and then you have all the Kofa countries like the RMI.

**Carlos** (4:15)
Yeah, absolutely.

**James** (4:16)
I guess if you wanted to put them on a T-shirt, you'd need a really fucking big T-shirt to keep it to scale. It is a vast global empire.
Yeah, you have bases in Africa, bases in Greenland, bases all over the world.

**Carlos** (4:31)
Absolutely. So at a time when Trump has made several overtures towards expanding the physical territory of the United States by either making Canada, Greenland, or Venezuela, or a bunch of other places, ostensibly the 51st state, I think it's important that people know that the US is not only a military and economic empire, but a literal one, with control over a series of territories and their people that spans the Pacific and the Caribbean, as well as the aforementioned military bases.